would be impossible. In Sutherland, where the best off hadn't
so painfully much more than the worst off, and where everybody
but the idle and the drunken, and even they most of the time,
had enough to eat, and a decent place to sleep, and some kind
of Sunday clothes--in Sutherland the poverty was less than in
Cincinnati, infinitely less than in this vast and incredibly
rich New York where in certain districts wealth, enormous
wealth, was piled up and up. So evidently the presence of
riches did not help poverty but seemed to increase it. No, the
disease was miserable, thought Susan. For most of the human
race, disease and bad food and vile beds in dingy holes and
days of fierce, poorly paid toil--that was the law of this hell
of a world. And to escape from that hideous tyranny, you must
be hard, you must trample, you must rob, you must cease to be human.

The apostle of discontent insisted that the law could be
changed, that the tyranny could be abolished. She listened,
but he did not convince her. He sounded vague and dreamy--as
fantastically false in his new way as she had found the Sunday
school books to be. She passed on.

She continued to pay out a cent each day for the newspaper.
She no longer bothered with the want ads. Pipe dreaming did
not attract her; she was too fiercely bent upon escape, actual
escape, to waste time in dreaming of ways of escape that she
never could realize. She read the paper because, if she could
not live in the world but was battered down in its dark and
foul and crowded cellar, she at least wished to know what was
going on up in the light and air. She found every day news of
great doings, of wonderful rises, of rich rewards for industry
and thrift, of abounding prosperity and of opportunity fairly
forcing itself into acceptance. But all this applied only to
the few so strangely and so luckily chosen, while the mass was
rejected. For that mass, from earliest childhood until death,
there was only toil in squalor--squalid food, squalid clothing,
squalid shelter. And when she read one day--in an obscure
paragraph in her newspaper--that the income of the average
American family was less than twelve dollars a week--less than
two dollars and a half a week for each individual--she realized
that what she was seeing and living was not New York and
Cincinnati, but was the common lot, country wide, no doubt
world wide.

"_Must_ take hold!" her mind cried incessantly to her shrinki